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Can NASCAR Media Tour No. 31 possibly measure up to the best previous ones?

January 20, 2013

The annual Charlotte media tour is a popular way for reporters to get a head start on the upcoming season. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

The 31st NASCAR Media Tour, put on by the Charlotte Motor Speedway, has me hoping that there will be as many hysterical anecdotes as there have been in past years.

No doubt some of the spontaneity is gone, but I'm still hopeful.

Looking back, two incidents stand out in my memory, and forgive me if I don't remember which years they occurred.

First up is team owner Felix Sabates and his crying towel. Mr. Sabates put on an act that had us rolling in the aisles.

As I recall, the Cuban-born immigrant owned Sabco Racing which since has became part of Chip Ganassi Racing and subsequently merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc.

Felix was always ready with a quote, and usually it was a funny one.

On that particular media tour stop, at his race shop, Sabates greeted everyone sporting a light blue towel which he called a “Ford crying towel,” and went on to skewer Ford team owners who were lobbying for changes in their then-new Taurus body style which was perceived to be at a disadvantage to Sabates' Chevrolets. Both the print and electronic media had a field day with it.

Before the Car of Tomorrow, when each manufacturer had a body which was different from other manufacturers, representatives of various rival teams would lobby NASCAR officials for rules to help maintain parity. In essence they were seeking to either preserve or obtain an advantage.

That brings me to today. I asked Stewart Haas Racing's Ryan Newman, an engineer as well as a driver, if there were any perceived advantages among the three manufacturers, and he said for now there was none. He also said he expected that to change once more miles are put on the Gen 6 cars.

The Case of the Purloined Piston

Most of you will recognize Andy Petree from his expert commentary on television. But first he was a crew chief for Dale Earnhardt at Richard Childress Racing, winning two Cup titles with the Intimidator. Later he became a team owner on his own.

We stopped one morning at Petree's team's race shop which was thrashing to get ready not only for the tour but for the Daytona 500.

Jerry Gappens (now the executive VP and general manager of New Hampshire Motor Speedway) was the PR director at the time. He made a speech, and let everyone in attendance know before the program began that the piston heads on the lunch tables were not souvenirs, but actual piston heads. Because the team's racing program came together too late to obtain proper ash trays, those piston heads were obtained from the race shop and placed on the tables to substitute for ash trays. He repeated his request that attendees leave those “ashtrays” when it was time to go.

On the following morning, during procedural announcements, Gappens got up before the group and was not happy, and was in fact very embarrassed. Petree called and said that there were (call it) six pistons missing. Worse, since the pistons came from different sets of eight, that meant ordering 48 pistons to replace them.

He implored the group to return the purloined pistons to a box outside his hotel door, no questions asked and there would be no harm and no foul.

One day after amnesty, Gappens returned with a sheepish grin on his face and said he was glad to announce that all the missing pistons had been returned -- plus one!

To this day, I think no one knows which shop that orphaned piston came from.

One last memory was the food. North Carolina is proudly known for its barbecue. And we seemed to get it for lunch and dinner almost every day of the four-day event. I grumbled, but never put it in writing, that we should have some other type of main dish and fruits and vegetables. The food, today is fancier, but now we never seem to get barbecue, and I miss it.

Let me leave you with the funniest moment of the day. When asked about his mother's influence, Tony Stewart remarked that she didn't want him to become a race driver. He should have gone to college as she wished. The time champion added ruefully, “Now she works for me.”